This blog is a great opportunity to share ideas about ways to
transform schooling as we know it, to help all students realise their
talents, passions and dreams. Be great to hear from anyone out there! Feel free to add a comment to Bruce's Blog and enter e-mail to receive postings

Peggy Burrows, highly regarded principal of
Rangiora High School, has been victimised in what seems to be a Ministry of
Education hatchet job. Kelvin Smythe has taken up his keyboard to write the
following two articles exposing this travesty. A very active Facebook page has
also been set up to fight for justice for Peggy.

Another huge bureaucraticinjustice

“It
is another case of the education bureaucracy listening to the wrong people;
believing them to be the worth listening to because, it seems, they want to
believe teaching professionals aren’t. The
government and education bureaucrats are doing inhumane things to professional
educators as an expression, it is suggested, of a kind of perverted education
policy.”

You are urged to sign the petition to support Peggy Burrows,
principal, Rangiora HighSchool

“From
the response to an earlier posting by two people supporting the intervention
two worrying but not uncommon themes made an appearance: anti-women (not
capable of handling complex finances) and Peggy being too pro-Maori…”

How to Master the Art of “Effective Surprise” and the 6 Essential Conditions for
Creativity

The great Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner had
his 100th birthday last week. Here’s
a Brainpickings article that discusses his thinking about creativity.

Happy 100th

“There
is something antic about creating, although the enterprise be serious. And
there is a matching antic spirit that goes with writing about it, for if ever
there was a silent process, it is the creative one. Antic and serious and
silent. Yet there is good reason to inquire about creativity, a reason beyond
practicality, for practicality is not a reason but a justification after the
fact. The reason is the ancient search of the humanist for the excellence of
man: the next creative act may bring man to a new dignity.”

Happy 100th Birthday, Jerome Bruner: The Pioneering Psychologist on
the Act of Discovery and the Key to True Learning

“Discovery
… is in its essence a matter of rearranging or transforming evidence
in such a way that one is enabled to go beyond the evidence so reassembled to
new insights. It may well be that an additional fact or shred of evidence makes
this larger transformation possible. But it is often not even dependent on new
information.

“In
the debate over school autonomy, what frequently gets lost is that school
autonomy is different from teacher autonomy and that it is teacher autonomy
that is the more important factor for classroom learning. Teacher autonomy
means collective professional autonomy.”

“Watching a father read to his child
sends a very strong message that he is interested in spending time with his
child and engages his child in one of the most rewarding and beneficial
activities for children's development.”

“The word “joy”caught me off guard—I’m certainly not used to hearing the
word in conversations about education in America, where I received my training
and taught for several years. But Holappa, detecting my surprise, reiterated
that the country’s early-childhood education program
indeed places a heavy emphasis on “joy,”which along with play is explicitly
written into the curriculum as a learning concept.”

Science
Shows Something Surprising About People Who Still Read Fiction

Many
so-called ‘reformers’have
downgraded fiction and instead set standards for reading non-fiction books, on
the basis that these will be more ‘use’to
children as they enter the workforce….

“Researchers calculated emotional
transportation by having participants express how astory they read affected them emotionally
ona five-point scale —for example, how the main character's
success made them feel, and how sorry they felt for the characters.

In thestudy, empathy was only apparent in
the groups of people who read fictionand who were emotionally transported.
Meanwhile, those who were not transported demonstrated a decrease in empathy.”

“Educational psychology has focused on
the concepts of learned helplessness and more currently growth-fixed mindsets
as a way to explain how and why students give up in the classroom setting.These ideas can also be applied to
educators in this day of forced standardization, testing, scripted curriculum,
and school initiatives.”

“In a classroom, or within any group of
learners, the reality is that each individual has a different learning experience,
even while they all are instructed the same way. Fascinating, isn't it? We all
bring into the learning situation our own learning history and cultural
background, our life-long, life-wide and life-deep understanding what learning
is. What we all need is support for our individual development, and empowering
learning facilitation that helps us to learn even more.”

“In his final article for Scientific American, in 1998, Mr.
Gardner lamented the “glacial”progress resulting from his efforts to
have recreational math introduced into school curriculums “as a way to

interest young students in the wonders of
mathematics.”Indeed, a paper this year in the
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics points out that recreational math can be used
to awaken mathematics-related “joy,”“satisfaction,”“excitement”and
“curiosity”in students, which the educational
policies of several countries (including China, India, Finland, Sweden,
England, Singapore and Japan) call for in writing.”

“New jobs are being created all the time. For educators,
this means equipping students with the skills they need to learn and adapt to a
changing world. Lifelong learning skills are hard to measure, so we have to use
proxies.”

“Over my 10 years in teaching, I have seen eccentric
colleagues pushed, blinking and disorientated, into a new world of lesson
observations, targets, data and appraisals. There are undoubtedly those who, as
well as being eccentric, are rather lazy and probably not up to the job. But
the problem is that many of these mavericks, who wouldn’t recognise a lesson plan if it bit them on the behind and
couldn’t care less about student data or targets, are brilliant.”

'An education in the arts is limited to the economically
privileged. It is an unjust waste of national talent’

This is so true.

“A good education should be a preparation for life. It
requires the development of the whole child, not merely their intellect. It
necessitates students becoming intrinsic learners with self-discipline and a
genuine thirst for knowledge, rather than being goaded or corralled, which is
what students may become with a single-minded focus on exam results. The value
of arts and culture is important for all students.”

There's no better feeling that seeing
design concepts and sketches come to life before your eyes.This is an idea schools could make use
of? Real personalisedportfolios of students’
ideas.

“I believe that the process of a project is just as
important as the final product; it shows a journey and a connection between an
initial idea and the physical design it ends up becoming. It's a transformation
and a visual representation of the ability to do none other than create. The
design process is a beautiful thing, and it's always been something that I've
prided myself on in my work.”

“Focused school visits are a powerful means to gain
professional development and, in particular, to gain insights in to what other
schools/teachers feel important. This is all the more necessary as schools are
increasingly under pressure to distort their teaching programmes by the need to
respond to the reactionary and politically inspired introduction of National
Standards.”

“The following is a simple but powerful process to 'tap the
wisdom' of all involved but one that demands shared leadership, particularly by
key people in the school –and
of course total commitment by the principal. All involved must see the benefit
of developing such a vision and be determined to see that it is reflected in
the: values the school believes in (as seen by behaviours of students, teachers
and parents); and the agreed teaching beliefs of the school.”

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

It is important to remember that technology based learning is only part of the whole picture at Tairua School. Half the day is spent on the basics, reading, writing, maths etc. They also have a focus on PE and outdoor activities such as swimming, Kayaking and Sailing.

Thanks anon. As I mentioned I do not have any real knowledge about the school. I do worry about half the day ( the morning) given over to the 'basics'. I would be interested how much such 'basics' contribute to the inquiry programme and if ability grouping is part of this? The outdoor activities sound great.